ISAIAH BERLIN: UNDERSTANDING, NOT MASTERY
McCabe, David
what wonderful stories I heard. When we said farewell to Mitsuko, I walked Isaiah back to his flat in Albany. Along the way we began to hum the opening bars of Schubert's Sonata, in B Flat, D....
...I told him it was the only city in the world I loved, and he said, "Yes, I too find it the best of cities...
...I found it a sign that he knew the eternal when he saw it...
...I want to speak.'" Of course, when I went to London for his memorial in the Hamstead Synagogue, I could not do that for, as he had said, it was a grand and grave event...
...Isaiah's soul is most clear to me in his essay on Verdi, "The Naivet6 of Verdi...
...I left him at the entrance to Albany, that grand and imposing set of flats tucked in behind the traffic where all who are anybody in the world of the mighty might choose to live, but Isaiah was beyond that, what with the Romantics in his mind and Schubert bringing order to the present little winter tempest...
...Got me on pitch...
...I told Isaiah how transcendent Rome had been, how filled with light and flowers and cool fountains' bright tumult in the sun, cascading through my grief...
...London would be a strange place without him now, as if the recitative had been lifted out of Bach's B Minor Mass, as if the branches of a flowering tree had suddenly withered and left their blossoms on the ground...
...Though from time to time, to flee eternal encounters with his friends--Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Mozart, especially Schubert--he might drift away and look downward from the divine promontories toward earth, ardently and with rue, wishing to be part again of its enchanted spin through space...
...I think that that just slightly mad and music-stricken, romantic corner of paradise where Keats and Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, and Coleridge dwell will greet Isaiah with delight...
...And about Isaiah's troubles with death and a final annihilation, I offer this last reflection...
...Undaunted, he paced along...
...I'm drawn to mad people," he told me when we were talking about Hamann...
...My son had died of AIDS a month before...
...They will be a revelation to him...
...Once, over lunch at the Garrick, he told me that one of the first songs he ever learned was "A Bicycle Built for Two...
...Dull, loving remembrances and no music anywhere--no piano, violin, string quartet--just sweet reflections that went on far too long...
...I trust Isaiah's quicker-than-light wit to smile at this notion...
...On the trip back to New York I wept...
...grief, fury, mockery, cruelty, irony, fanaticism, the passions that all men know...
...During Easter of 1996 when I saw Isaiah in London, I had just come from Rome where I had scattered my son's ashes beneath an umbrella pine on a terrace in the Vatican...
...Ah, I thought, that is good to know because my son, through all his tribulations with his sickness, through his loss of faith, yet asked me to scatter his ashes there where we had spent many summers...
...No death but my own son's has left me so alone...
...As we sang it together--"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true...
...Isaiah set me right...
...saiah said to me the year before he died--not his exact words (I never kept notes after my visits with him, thinking it a violation of some kind of trust) but true to the spirit of his thought-"Ned, when I die, there will be a grand memorial and you must come to it and push through the crowds and say, 'I knew Sir Isaiah Berlin, he was my friend...
...Music always, always its clarion call to the mystery, always at the center of everything Isaiah found true and beautiful in his radiant life, even in the storm of the early evening in Picadilly...
...I got something wrong, the trills, I think, that crash up out of the abyss of Schubert's melancholy in the first movement...
...I shall always hope that he might just walk into a room and greet me...
...Caro amico," he would say, and then, when we had settled down to some hot chocolate (his) and wine (mine), "Now Ned, what is your news...
...Isaiah wore neither scarf nor gloves...
...we began to muse over just how Susanna's aria in the last act of The Marriage of Figaro went, going over bits of it to get it more or less right...
...Along the way we began to hum the opening bars of Schubert's Sonata, in B Flat, D. 960...
...He wrote, "He [Verdi] was the last master to paint with positive, clear primary colors, to give direct expression to the eternal, major human emotions: love and hate, jealousy and fear, indignation and passion...
...Isaiah could not understand why Brendel could not bear Richter--Brendel turned off the radio Commonweal | 6 August 14, 1998 once when a recording of Richter's was played...
...Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true," now that would have added a decent zing and would have revealed an Isaiah someone other than I must have known...
...Commonweal | T August 14, 1998...
...Alfred Brendel played the second movement of Schubert's B Flat Major Sonata, D.960 with care, and a sense of loss in every note, with complete sorrow as if he played it just for his beloved friend, as if he were there before him...
...His sensibility is captured there---all the themes of his intellect, of his spirit...
...I remember how cold it was...
...I think Isaiah saw it there as well, as he of course discerned it in Schubert and in Falstaff and in Bach...
...The memorial held later in the month at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., was just the sort Isaiah would have disapproved of with impatient but charitable annoyance...
...The space was filled with his friends, titles and all of that, and it would have been a silly gesture and not tolerated...
...he pushed away the air, the sleet, his voice piercing the winds...
...Isaac Stern, with fragile reverence and some torment, played the Sarabande from the D. Minor Partita of Bach...
...All very solemn-adagio, andante, no vivace, allegro, presto, scherzo--no music to recall Albert Alfred Apricott...
Vol. 125 • August 1998 • No. 14
